California Reports 11 Cases Of New “Stealth” Omicron Strain, BA.2
deadline.comTwo days after the first cases of an offshoot of the more transmissible Omicron variant was discovered in the U.S., 11 cases of the strain, dubbed BA.2, were reported in California on Tuesday.
Two of those cases were identified in one of the state’s most populous counties, Santa Clara, according to multiple reports.It’s early days, but based on the rate of spread in countries such as Denmark and the U.K., some experts are saying that BA.2 is likely at least a bit more transmissible than the original Omicron (BA.1).“The consistency of BA.2 growth across several counties means that it’s more transmissible than BA.1,” wrote epidemiologist Dr.
Katelyn Jetelina of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston on Tuesday. “It’s likely nothing like the huge transmissibility jump we saw from Delta to Omicron,” however.Denmark has been hardest hit by BA.2.
On Monday, it accounted for nearly half of the test samples sequenced in that country. In the final week of December, according to data from Statens Serum Institut under the auspices of the Danish Ministry of Health, the subvariant accounted for 20% of all Covid cases in Denmark.
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